The Coachman Won’t Stop
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs: Coen Brothers Canon
The thing you have to understand is Fort Morgan is an illusion. Three characters sit jammed against each other in a stagecoach: a Frenchman, an upper class older woman, and a filthy trapper come straight from the wilderness. Across from them sit two other men, a dandy Englishman and a large Irish fellow. Unlike the other three, who don’t know each other and have been thrust into each other’s close company, cramped and ill at ease, these two are a pair and perfectly comfortable. Unlike the other three, who have never been to Fort Morgan, they’ve been many times, bringing the dead.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs was the final film that Joel and Ethan Coen made together. That could change—the brothers haven’t had a falling out and certainly might reunite—but it’s the case for now. The place Buster Scruggs holds at the end of the line bears mentioning up top because it’s a film about endings and making sense of the end.
Endings are quite important to me. They can make or break an entire work of art. I recently watched Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain, which is a visual feast, a bizarre and mesmerizing swirl of images that simply doesn’t have an ending. Jodorowsky rejects my premise and rejects his responsibility to provide an ending. This is certainly an artistic choice but it’s not one I respect. Whatever The Holy Mountain could mean, in the grand sense, it means a lot less for this failing. I’m not demanding neat and tidy endings or moral simplicity or the absence of ambiguity—leave it dark, leave it murky, leave it confusing, but I ask that it be complete. Once the tapestry has been unrolled all the way, I want to look back from finish to start to see it whole.
Which is why we begin this series here. The Coen Brothers have never been the most forthcoming. If you read old interviews and articles about them, there’s an almost mandatory apology in the introduction where the journalist warns the reader off, saying the brothers were flip, ironic, and totally unhelpful in their responses. When David Edelstein visited the set of Raising Arizona in 1987, he pushed them on the question of making a movie about babies and establishing a nuclear family—was that a pressing concern in their own lives? Joel, growing impatient, eventually replies:
“You have a scene in a movie when someone gets shot, right? Bang! And the squib goes off and the blood runs down and you get a reaction, right? It’s movie fodder, you know what I mean? And in a really different way, a baby’s face is movie fodder. You just wanna take elements that are good fodder and do something different with them.”
I think this answer is quite illuminating, in its way. Already at that early point in their career the brothers were being feted for their unconventional stories and remarkable scripts but Joel is advancing instead a highly analytical approach to film construction that emphasizes discrete building blocks that can be assembled in novel ways. This is telling, though Edelstein is right that it doesn’t help him with a biographical sketch of the siblings.
But if the brothers have remained tightlipped themselves, the movies have grown more forthcoming. And none more so than The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. It’s a film that takes some of their most common elements and puts them under the microscope in a self-conscious attempt to make sense of their vast body of work. Out of all the toys in the box, the brothers ask, why did we choose these ones over and over? It’s the most open they’ve ever been.
The film consists of six short stories set in the Old West. Already their filmmaking history threatens to intrude. Their career began with the Texas-set Blood Simple and reached its zenith—at least in terms of awards—with No Country For Old Men, also set there. The American west means something quite specific to the Coens, as Joel told interviewers in 1987: “Blood Simple had been conceived…by taking Texas not as it really is, but as something preserved in legend, a collection of histories and myths… [that have] grown in the public imagination.” We’ll have more to say about this in future installments but for now it’s enough to say that the Coens are interested in the way landscapes and the intricacies of local cultures structure our thoughts and actions. And, further, the way westerns and the myth of the frontier continue to echo through time, shaping how our conceptions of safety, order, freedom, and lawlessness play out across time periods.
The first segment, the eponymous Ballad of Buster Scruggs, is so rich in Coen-isms I could write this whole article referencing only it. Scruggs, as played by Tim Blake Nelson, is something close to a living cartoon character, a comically loquacious, genial gunslinger capable of massacring a full bar of toughs without hesitating or getting a speck of blood on his white outfit. He’s a master speaker of Coen-ese, the ornate, totally unreal idiot poetry the brothers specialize in.
When he identifies himself to a gambler who’s threatening to shoot him, he says, “I do hail from Reata Pass, which is in the county of San Saba, being the which of why the “San Saba Songbird” is my sobriquet of preference. But right now I’d appreciate it if you’d deposit your weapon in the receptacle by the swinging doors, which concealing of it on your person in the first place was a violation of the rules of this establishment and an offense against local norms.” When the gambler refuses and cocks his pistol, Scruggs slams his foot on the table, sending a plank upward on the far side, causing the gambler to shoot himself under the chin and drop dead. Scruggs justifies his actions to the bar: “I’m not a devious man by nature, but when you’re unarmed, your tactics might gotta be downright Archimedean,” before breaking into song. Overwrought? Certainly. But also wonderful, an even more heightened version of the heightened verse they’ve put in the mouths of lowlifes and illiterates for decades. A recurring theme when the Coens have discussed their own work is their constant process of looking at what they’ve written and asking how do we make this more interesting? Wouldn’t it be more interesting if this dark crime story had jokes? Wouldn’t it be more interesting if this character contained multitudes? It’s a balancing act, to push everything to its limits while also keeping it true the characters somehow. Developing Nic Cage’s baroque narration for Raising Arizona they “imagined from the likely reading material of the characters: the Bible, magazines.”
The high and the low. Poetic souls, feet of clay. Yearnings for transcendence and the immutable impossibility of doing so. No one does it better.
So Buster is bouncing off the walls, being hoisted onto the bar and doing a jig while the crowd sings along. He’s like a Chuck Jones character, Wile E. Coyote in a white suit. And then he steps outside, where another gunslinger challenges him to a duel, and beats him to the trigger. Buster Scruggs, you’ve reached the end of the line, there will always be a faster gun eventually. He dies there on the street and his soul leaves his body and floats up to heaven, singing the whole way, duetting with his killer below. “Let me tell you buddy,/ there’s a faster gun/ coming over yonder when tomorrow comes./ Let me tell you buddy,/ and it won’t be long,/ till you find yourself singing your last cowboy song…”
The tonal control on display is astounding. The segment never stops being comical and cartoonish—Buster’s little angel wings are ridiculous—and yet it’s genuinely moving. It provokes a feeling I’m not sure I can name—it’s not sadness, not pity or fear, but it’s something, something real. That the Coens can pull this feeling out on command for an unreal, unsympathetic somebody after fifteen minutes is nothing short of astounding.
At every level the film is an exercise is this sort of back and forth. In the second segment, James Franco gets the biggest laugh line of the picture moments before being hanged to death. Then after two basically amusing segments, they hit you with “Meal Ticket,” one of the bleakest sequences they’ve ever produced, utterly bereft of hope and warmth, that incidentally features the best performance Liam Neeson has maybe ever given. And then it’s right back to comedy for “All Gold Canyon,” in which Tom Waits prospects for a deposit of gold that he addresses repeatedly as “Mr. Pocket.” I genuinely don’t understand how they can make a coherent film out of such dissonant tones; they made a career out of it.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs features two great speeches, both of which feel like retroactive mission statements for the questions they’ve explored throughout their careers. The first comes in segment five, “The Gal Who Got Rattled.” On a wagon train going west to Oregon territory, a romance blooms between the isolated Alice Longabaugh (Zoe Kazan) and the ranchhand Billy Knapp (Bill Heck). During a long talk, Alice says her dead brother used to upbraid her for being wishy-washy. She never had many certainties, which she supposes is a defect. Knapp says the following:
I don’t think it’s a defect. Oh no. Uncertainty, that is appropriate for matters of this world; only regarding the next are we vouchsafed certainty. I believe certainty regarding that which we can see and touch—it is seldom justified, if ever. On down the ages from our remote past, what certainties survive? And yet we hurry to fashion new ones, wanting their comfort. Certainty, it’s the easy path, just as you said.
Alice, clearly touched, replies quoting Matthew 7:14: “Straight is the gate,” and Knapp finishes the verse, “and narrow the way.” I don’t want to cannibalize all my future material here but this is another key theme we’ll watch out for over the course of this series. How does certainty operate? How do characters achieve certainty? When is it justified? How does it lead us down the wrong path? If, as Plato unpacks in the Laches, most virtues have their dark double—courage/recklessness, cleverness/deviousness—is certainty a virtue or merely its shadow?
For the second great speech, let us finally return to that carriage racing toward Fort Morgan. This is the final segment of the film, “The Mortal Remains.” When it begins, the sun hovers low over the featureless landscape outside the window. Soon it is night. As the Frenchman Rene (Saul Rubinek), the dignified Mrs. Betjemen (Tyne Daly), and the unnamed trapper (Chelcie Ross) bicker about life philosophies and how they conducted themselves on earth, Thigpen the dandy (Jonjo O’Neill) and Clarence the Irishman (Brendan Gleeson) look on with amusement, their facial expressions betraying surprise and derision at the others’ certainty.
Eventually the conversation turns to them. They’ve already mentioned they’re transporting the body on the roof, a poor Mr. Thorpe, but why, what is their work? Thigpen and Clarence don’t demur. “I like to say that we’re… reapers,” Thigpen says. “Harvesters of souls,” Clarence adds in an almost-singsong. “We help people who have been adjudged to be ripe,” Thigpen says. The trapper glosses this as meaning they’re bounty hunters. “Literal man!” Thigpen scoffs.
Let’s just watch it:
And finally we have it. The great theme of the Coen Brothers: death. Someone dies in every segment of the film before “The Mortal Remains.” There are exceptions but death is haunts nearly every film they have ever made. Think of Anton Chigurh in No Country forcing people to call his coin flip with their lives on the line. The Coens have never tired of watching—and making us watch—their characters negotiate the passage.
When I said Buster Scruggs was the most open the Coen Brothers have ever been, I was talking about this monologue. It’s no coincidence that Thigpen and Clarence operate as “a duo, a tandem, a team,” one the verbal impresario and the other the visceral thumper. Their duties have always intermingled more than the strict delineation of their credits would imply, but Ethan, the screenwriter and Joel, the director responsible capturing that squib going off—bang!—and the blood flowing, are themselves sitting in this carriage explaining what has fascinated them so and led them to tell the stories they have. It’s not that they’re cruel—they don’t hate their characters, don’t want them to suffer—it’s that they’ve been adjudged to be ripe. Following their stories and their characters to their only possible ends, they remain deeply invested, seeking understanding, the inner worlds of their creations more complex than they could consciously intend.
And what do we take from their films? Are we, as Thigpen says, “like little children,” connecting the stories to ourselves? Thigpen seems to think it’s laughable that his audiences can perform the mental contortions to keep his characters “us, but not us.” But is that not precisely the point of watching these films, of looking into the eyes of so many, many characters as they “try to make sense of it, as they pass to the other place?” Like Thigpen, we’ll never have definitive answers, because we’re only watching. Ethan was a philosophy major in college, which he disavowed in 1987 as having few connections to his work as a filmmaker. And yet in the Phaedo Socrates calls philosophy the practice of death. From Blood Simple to Buster Scruggs the coachman has brought the dead to Fort Morgan and the Coens have played out the variations over and over, the practice of death.
